Why do we exercise?
Have you ever thought about how strange it is that we need to exercise? It’s actually pretty bizarre, when you stop to think about it for a couple minutes. Everyone knows exercise is good for us, but could anyone actually explain to you why?
For so many of us in the developed world, we have never had more access to food, wealth, or healthcare, and yet in the United States most markers of health and longevity are getting worse over time, not better. Why is this?
Well, for almost all of human history we spent most of our day trying to find food, and it was not until the invention of farming and subsequent advancements in medical technology that we broke free from this constraint. For the vast majority of human existence, we died from diseases of scarcity or infections. Now, the vast majority of us now die from non-communicable diseases, i.e. those that are inherently preventable. Even in a year ravaged by the Covid-19 Pandemic, 60% of all deaths came from inherently preventable diseases. While there is certainly no one answer to this incredibly complicated question, one potential explanation is called Mismatch Theory, popularized by Daniel Lieberman.
In the context of evolutionary biology, the theory is defined as follows; a previously advantageous trait may become maladaptive due to changes in the environment, especially when that change is rapid. Human beings evolved for thousands of years under a specific set of circumstances, and most important among those circumstances was the certainty of scarcity. Up until a couple hundred years ago, you had to work hard and expend a lot of energy throughout your day to ensure that you had enough to eat. It has only been quite recently that technological progress broke us out of that scarcity. We evolved over thousands of years to crave hyper-palatable energy dense foods, because calories were at such a premium. We evolved to move as little as possible, because with food so difficult to find, why would we waste the energy? And our bodies evolved to prevent any excess fitness, because whatever was not essential was a waste.
At Woven, this theory informs the way we see the world. We struggle to be healthy in this modern world because our environments are fundamentally changed. We don’t lack discipline, we are acting in ways that are in direct opposition to thousands of years of evolutionary history. This is a monumental challenge that should not be overlooked.
In the face of this challenge, change occurs only when you are able to manipulate your environment to cultivate the habits that you need to be successful. We are hardwired to crave hyperpalatable foods, and so we should cultivate a home that promotes the types of nutrient dense foods that are aligned with our goals. We struggle with staying on track with an exercise routine because we have to delay immediate gratification in order to reap the long term benefits. We need multiple forms of accountability to keep us on track because we are not designed to succeed on our own. It is only by cultivating our environment and putting in place real consequences for failure that we give ourselves the chance to build habits that will truly stick.
